Texas Memory Systems demos 1TB RAM disk

A question that many of us techies doubtlessly ask ourselves quite often is, “What would I do with a 1 Terabyte RAM disk?”. Aside from bragging rights, there's not much I could fathom needing that much, but in an enterprise environment, it might be exactly the answer to former massive RAIDs of hundreds of disks. Company Texas Memory Systems has formed a 1TB SAN RAM disk. It is dubbed “Tera-RamSan” and in a network environment acts as a NAS, and has a 4Gbit fiber channel for connectivity.

With most RAM disks, if the power goes out – it's game over. But not completely, because this beast can write everything it is storing to an additional array of hard drives if the power goes out, then shut itself off – preventing any data loss and even providing a means of internal redundancy. That 24GByte/sec throughput, something that would put even the world's fastest traditional HDD arrays to shame, comes at quite a cost - $1 Million to start and over 3200W of power during use. Amazing stuff.